Bangladesh: A country with huge publishing potential

Nafiz Zaman Shuva is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Information Science & Library Management, University of Dhaka and the President of Bangladesh Association of Young Researchers (BAYR). He is the Managing Editor of the Journal of the Bangladesh Association of Young Researchers (JBAYR) and The Eastern Librarian

Let me talk about publishing opportunities in Bangladesh. If you take a look at the list of journals available on Bangladesh Journals Online (BanglaJOL), you can see that universities and research organizations in Bangladesh are publishing a good number of journals each year. Without the BanglaJOL project it was extremely difficult to find out about the journals published in this country. BanglaJOL provides a single place to find, read and download articles.

Still there are researchers and faculty members who are against online journal management and are reluctant to be part of the BanglaJOL community. They believe online journals are not peer-reviewed and do not maintain the standards that a print journal does. I feel this is kind of stupid. They don’t think and explore the ample opportunities available with the Open Journal System (OJS) — the platform BanglaJOL uses. I have been using OJS since 2010 and I have seen huge benefits in managing the articles submitted to the Journal of the Bangladesh Association of Young Researchers (JBAYR). It has also made communicating with authors and reviewers easy.

The peer-review process in OJS is quite simple and user-friendly. One of the major benefits of using this is that it reduces the potential for plagiarism. When a researcher thinks of submitting a paper to a journal that will be available online, they will think carefully, because their paper will be viewed and downloaded by many readers around the world. Thus the author of the paper will put extra concentration and effort into correcting references and citing others.

I had a talk with some journal editors during an INASP workshop in May. They told me they are very happy to be a part of BanglaJOL and that they are experiencing great benefits by using OJS. They were especially excited to get several paper submissions from foreign authors. When I receive a foreign submission, I feel the same. Without ensuring our journal presence online, we cannot think of getting foreign submissions.

However, browsing the subject coverage of BanglaJOL it is obvious that there are subject gaps, specifically in the humanities. I am trying to convince some of the journals editors from the humanities to upload their journals online. That said, it is my personal observation that journals in humanities are slower in publication than in business and science.

See Nafiz’s previous post ‘Bangladesh: A country with great research potential‘.